Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division

Henry T. De La Beche, Notes on the Present Condition of the Negroes in Jamaica (London: Printed for T. Cadell, in the Strand, 1825)

The First Migration

The sugar-producing plantations in the Caribbean were a primary source of African labor for British North America. Barbados in the seventeenth century and Jamaica in the eighteenth century were Britain's most prized colonies, and numerous enslaved Africans, as well as their children born in the Caribbean, were taken to South Carolina to develop the mainland British colonies.